Faith Eliza Cord
Four Thousand Club
How to Fly
Author notes: This is about Fighting Academy's Sheena and Faith, telling the story of how they met and much of their history. I'll tell it in two or three chapters. everything that Legs mentions about her past is directly from Joyce Carol Oates’s book Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. In fact there are several quotes that are directly from the novel. I do not own any of these quotes.
Chapter 1
I probably wouldn’t have stopped, if she hadn’t reminded me of Maddy.
I mean it wasn’t like it was the best thing to do, for me or for her. The kid was obviously new to the streets- I could tell from the way she was dressed that she hadn’t worked out the art of layering yet, and that’s something you have to do in the winter just to stay alive sometimes. It looked to me like the clothes she was wearing, when I first saw her, were the clothes she’d been wearing for the past week or two, which was probably exactly how long she’d been on the streets. You just can’t do that, go so long without swapping out for new stuff for so long, and except to still blend in. And it sure as hell doesn’t help when you’re like 13 or 14 and scrawny as hell, which she was.
Cops will be all over you if you don’t know your stuff about blending in, moving fast, and always, always looking like you know exactly what you’re doing. You stumble for half a second and they catch you before you hit the ground on your own, throw you down way harder than you’d ever hit all on your own. If you didn’t know how to act, you were screwed in more than just the literal way, and it was pretty much guaranteed you were gonna end up getting screwed that way too.
The kid looked like she definitely didn’t know what she was doing. First off, she didn’t have the right way of carrying herself- it was like she was drawing herself up all defensive, just daring someone to cross her, but since I’d bet all the money I’d ever lifted in my lifetime she wasn’t older than 14, didn’t weigh more than 100 pounds, and hadn’t been on the streets for more than two weeks, it was total bullshit. You want people to leave you alone, you have to be casual along with confident, blending in, not walking around like you’re challenging someone to call you out. Then the way she hung around outside the gas station too long before going in, not even smoking a cigarette or doing something to look like she had a reason to be hanging around other than stealing, total amateur stuff. I swear it was as bad as Rita practically, before we worked Rita over. Then when I followed her inside, she was walking around STARING at everything, picking up CHIPS, like anyone can walk out the door with those crackling under their clothes and not get a one way ride to juvie in the deal for the effort. The kid was screwed.
I wasn’t gonna help her. I was just watching, because honestly it’s a long, boring day sometimes, out there alone with nothing much you have to do other than the same kind of shit every day. What good would it do if I helped the girl out? She was so young and new, and there would be so much to teach her before I could trust she wasn’t gonna get us both caught down the line. And I damn well couldn’t afford to get caught, not when I was probably wanted with a warrant and everything, back in New York. With what I’d done, it wouldn’t be just juvie this time, it would be prison, and then what about the rest of Foxfire, what if they got in trouble too? Or what if this girl couldn’t be trusted?
Prison…I’d kill people before I would go back to juvie, I swear I would, or at least hurt them so I could get away. I would kill myself before I’d go to prison. That’s the one thing I always promised, after getting out, that no one would ever do to me again what they did to me in there, no matter what. No one would ever hurt me, no one would ever touch me, no one was ever gonna put their foot to the back of my neck again…and not to Maddy either. And if they got me…if this girl got me caught…it might not matter what I said, Maddy might go down with me.
It was too much at risk, helping the girl out. I shouldn’t do it. It wasn’t like she was Foxfire…not one of my sisters, my blood. I never promised her anything. I didn’t even know her.
But then I started thinking about the girl getting caught, and going to juvie like I did when I was her age. I was almost sixteen, but I was only almost fifteen back then, and still just a kid, just like her. I thought about this girl getting stripped and searched, this girl getting kicked in the ribs and poked in the eye until the pus ran for weeks. I thought about the guards and then I couldn’t think about it anymore because it made my hands shake and my stomach cramp up, and I thought I might puke if I didn’t watch it.
She reminded me of Maddy, and I would never, ever let that happen to Maddy. So I had to help.
I stepped up behind the girl with Maddy’s long dark hair and Maddy’s bony body, and it was almost like I could go back in time, like I was 13 and climbing through Maddy’s window, crawling into her bed, as I slipped an arm around the girl’s shoulders and whispered in her ear.
“You haven’t been doing this for too long, have you, babe?”
Chapter 2
We never should have kidnapped Mr. Kellogg.
I don’t know why I thought that was gonna be a good plan. I mean, we were doing okay with just hooking, me and the rest of the Foxfire girls. We were making good money, even Maddy, even though she looked so young a lot of guys don’t really think of her that way. It has nothing to do with her not being pretty like Goldie said. That’s total bullshit. Maddy’s every bit as pretty as me and Rita, prettier than me, even. People are just picky assholes is all. Sometimes you don’t get a great chance to take their money, is all, and sometimes they didn’t have much. Still, if we had even one girl a day hook one guy and take his cash, it was good money, and as long as no one got hurt it was working out. We weren’t making a lot all the time, but it was some, and with Goldie and Lana having jobs too it was enough to have the stuff we needed to stay at the house, anyway, and since it was abandoned it wasn’t like we had to pay rent.
But we weren’t making money FAST, and there was so much we needed it for, not for us, so much, for other people, and who else was gonna get it but us? Marigold from juvie couldn’t get a job, her parents wouldn’t take her back and she didn’t have anywhere to go, she was the only one in the whole ******* place who wasn’t trying to make me lose it and I owed her something for that, didn’t I? And Maddy’s mom and Lana’s sister’s kids, and my own little sister, my own baby sister Evangeline and her mom Muriel. My dad was such a drunk bastard he didn’t even CARE, his own kid in the hospital ever since she’s born and he can’t even go SEE her, forget helping Muriel with money for her. My own baby sister in the hospital, not even able to hardly BREATHE, and they could kick her out, I bet, if Muriel didn’t pay long enough, and then what? Just let her die?
I couldn’t think about that, not then, not after it all. If we could get enough money, all at once, we could give it to Muriel and maybe we’d never have to worry about Evangeline again.
But we ****** it all up when V.V. almost killed Mr. Kellogg, and now maybe that killed Evangeline too. Because she didn’t get one dollar, NOTHING from it. And now maybe she’ll grow up thinking I’m dead, that I was a screw up just doing shit to do it, and she’ll never know it was all for her. She’ll never know how much I loved her, how I would have gave her all my breath so she’d never go blue again.
Or maybe she’ll never grow up at all, and that’s my fault too.
I didn’t know it would go so bad. I figured, Mr. Kellogg is rich, he can stand to lose a million bucks anyway. We’d take him, me and the rest of the gang, and we wouldn’t hurt him, we would just ask his family for money, and once we had it we’d let him go, no harm done.
But he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t eat, and his wife, his damn stupid wife wouldn’t pay, and then V.V. shot him and everything was ****** from then on.
I couldn’t let them go down for it, the rest of the gang. It was my idea, it was all for me, and if it got screwed over it should be me who went down. So I told them to run…and when the cops came, it was me they saw, and me they took off after. It’s me they’re still after, even though after the car over the bridge incident, which I wasn’t even part of in the first place, I’m pretty sure they think I’m dead. That’s probably the best thing even for the girls, because if they think I’m alive they’d come looking for me, and then they’d get in trouble too.
I knew all my options, if I ever got caught, if anyone knew I wasn’t even sixteen yet and still on the streets, let alone that I was Margaret Ann Sadovsky and I kidnapped one of the richest guys in New York. If I was lucky it would be back to foster homes or my grandma, or my drunkass dad who smacked me around every time he got pissed and lied about me in court and doesn’t want me around anyway, my dad who probably killed my mom but then sends me off to juvie when all I did was DEFEND myself and Violet with the stupid switchblade, I mean if you can’t pull a knife on a guy trying to feel up on your own sister what the hell can you pull it for? And if I wasn’t lucky, it would have been juvie, or prison, and I’d kill or die first.
No, I figured it was better if I never saw them again, if they all thought I was dead. Even Maddy, because that’s what would keep them all safe.
Maddy…god, I missed her so much. It was bad in juvie, but it was worse after I had to play dead, because playing dead would last forever. In juvie I could write to Maddy, even if what I wrote was stupid bullshit that didn’t say anything at all, because all the staff would read it before they’d pass it on. In juvie when it was really bad and I thought I’d go crazy or break apart into pieces if I had to be there one more second hearing their yelling, seeing their stupid grinning faces and feeling their hands on me, I could think of Maddy, see her even with my eyes wide open, and I knew if I just kept my cool I’d get out one day and see her again and nothing would ever pull me away.
But when you’re dead to someone, you don’t have any of that. You can’t write or call and you know you can never see them, and it’s almost like you’re really dead after all. Because you’re dead to them. And after a while even if you close your eyes and see her face so clearly it’s like she’s right there with you, you start to forget how her voice sounded, and how it felt to lay down with her arms around you…the way her eyes glowed when you told her she was your heart.
And she was, you know. Killer, Maddy, Maddy-Monkey…she was mine somehow. I loved my other Foxfire sisters, but Madeleine Faith Wirtz was my heart.
Sometimes after it happened, and I was alone like always, settling in on some fire escape or under a bridge or wherever I was for the night, I’d lay down, and I’d be sick like usual in this awful cold, shivering and coughing like a smoker even though I gave it up when it was too much effort to bum them all the time. I’d be sniffing up snot, keeping my hand over my heart tracing the Foxfire flame that’s been there since I put it there myself when I was thirteen. I’d trace the flame not needing to see it to know the shape, and I’d wonder if somewhere back in New York, or wherever she was then, Maddy was touching hers too.
I hoped she was, that she’d never, ever forget me or her Foxfire sisters, or everything we stood for, that even with it all ****** three ways to Sunday she’d still remember when it was like it was supposed to be, and we were making a difference. Lifting up women, protecting and providing for them, putting the asshole men that kept them down and hurt them in their place…but I was always scared that maybe she didn’t, that maybe she moved on. Found another girl, or worse, a man, and forgot all about me and Foxfire…told him the tattoo was a birthmark and forgot more than my face…forgot me and everything we were.
It can happen, I know it can, because I forgot my own mother, and she’s the one who gave me life, even though I think my father probably took hers away. She might have died for me, and I can’t even remember her face…I can’t remember anything about her. I didn’t ever want that to happen with me and Maddy.
But I could never see her to let her know she was still my heart, and no matter what I could never forget. So when I saw the girl in the gas station and she was Maddy all over, even if she and Maddy didn’t actually look all that much alike, it was like the world was letting me know I had one last chance, and she was it.
So I took it. Should have known I would screw it up too.
Author notes: This is about Fighting Academy's Sheena and Faith, telling the story of how they met and much of their history. I'll tell it in two or three chapters. everything that Legs mentions about her past is directly from Joyce Carol Oates’s book Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. In fact there are several quotes that are directly from the novel. I do not own any of these quotes.
Chapter 1
I probably wouldn’t have stopped, if she hadn’t reminded me of Maddy.
I mean it wasn’t like it was the best thing to do, for me or for her. The kid was obviously new to the streets- I could tell from the way she was dressed that she hadn’t worked out the art of layering yet, and that’s something you have to do in the winter just to stay alive sometimes. It looked to me like the clothes she was wearing, when I first saw her, were the clothes she’d been wearing for the past week or two, which was probably exactly how long she’d been on the streets. You just can’t do that, go so long without swapping out for new stuff for so long, and except to still blend in. And it sure as hell doesn’t help when you’re like 13 or 14 and scrawny as hell, which she was.
Cops will be all over you if you don’t know your stuff about blending in, moving fast, and always, always looking like you know exactly what you’re doing. You stumble for half a second and they catch you before you hit the ground on your own, throw you down way harder than you’d ever hit all on your own. If you didn’t know how to act, you were screwed in more than just the literal way, and it was pretty much guaranteed you were gonna end up getting screwed that way too.
The kid looked like she definitely didn’t know what she was doing. First off, she didn’t have the right way of carrying herself- it was like she was drawing herself up all defensive, just daring someone to cross her, but since I’d bet all the money I’d ever lifted in my lifetime she wasn’t older than 14, didn’t weigh more than 100 pounds, and hadn’t been on the streets for more than two weeks, it was total bullshit. You want people to leave you alone, you have to be casual along with confident, blending in, not walking around like you’re challenging someone to call you out. Then the way she hung around outside the gas station too long before going in, not even smoking a cigarette or doing something to look like she had a reason to be hanging around other than stealing, total amateur stuff. I swear it was as bad as Rita practically, before we worked Rita over. Then when I followed her inside, she was walking around STARING at everything, picking up CHIPS, like anyone can walk out the door with those crackling under their clothes and not get a one way ride to juvie in the deal for the effort. The kid was screwed.
I wasn’t gonna help her. I was just watching, because honestly it’s a long, boring day sometimes, out there alone with nothing much you have to do other than the same kind of shit every day. What good would it do if I helped the girl out? She was so young and new, and there would be so much to teach her before I could trust she wasn’t gonna get us both caught down the line. And I damn well couldn’t afford to get caught, not when I was probably wanted with a warrant and everything, back in New York. With what I’d done, it wouldn’t be just juvie this time, it would be prison, and then what about the rest of Foxfire, what if they got in trouble too? Or what if this girl couldn’t be trusted?
Prison…I’d kill people before I would go back to juvie, I swear I would, or at least hurt them so I could get away. I would kill myself before I’d go to prison. That’s the one thing I always promised, after getting out, that no one would ever do to me again what they did to me in there, no matter what. No one would ever hurt me, no one would ever touch me, no one was ever gonna put their foot to the back of my neck again…and not to Maddy either. And if they got me…if this girl got me caught…it might not matter what I said, Maddy might go down with me.
It was too much at risk, helping the girl out. I shouldn’t do it. It wasn’t like she was Foxfire…not one of my sisters, my blood. I never promised her anything. I didn’t even know her.
But then I started thinking about the girl getting caught, and going to juvie like I did when I was her age. I was almost sixteen, but I was only almost fifteen back then, and still just a kid, just like her. I thought about this girl getting stripped and searched, this girl getting kicked in the ribs and poked in the eye until the pus ran for weeks. I thought about the guards and then I couldn’t think about it anymore because it made my hands shake and my stomach cramp up, and I thought I might puke if I didn’t watch it.
She reminded me of Maddy, and I would never, ever let that happen to Maddy. So I had to help.
I stepped up behind the girl with Maddy’s long dark hair and Maddy’s bony body, and it was almost like I could go back in time, like I was 13 and climbing through Maddy’s window, crawling into her bed, as I slipped an arm around the girl’s shoulders and whispered in her ear.
“You haven’t been doing this for too long, have you, babe?”
Chapter 2
We never should have kidnapped Mr. Kellogg.
I don’t know why I thought that was gonna be a good plan. I mean, we were doing okay with just hooking, me and the rest of the Foxfire girls. We were making good money, even Maddy, even though she looked so young a lot of guys don’t really think of her that way. It has nothing to do with her not being pretty like Goldie said. That’s total bullshit. Maddy’s every bit as pretty as me and Rita, prettier than me, even. People are just picky assholes is all. Sometimes you don’t get a great chance to take their money, is all, and sometimes they didn’t have much. Still, if we had even one girl a day hook one guy and take his cash, it was good money, and as long as no one got hurt it was working out. We weren’t making a lot all the time, but it was some, and with Goldie and Lana having jobs too it was enough to have the stuff we needed to stay at the house, anyway, and since it was abandoned it wasn’t like we had to pay rent.
But we weren’t making money FAST, and there was so much we needed it for, not for us, so much, for other people, and who else was gonna get it but us? Marigold from juvie couldn’t get a job, her parents wouldn’t take her back and she didn’t have anywhere to go, she was the only one in the whole ******* place who wasn’t trying to make me lose it and I owed her something for that, didn’t I? And Maddy’s mom and Lana’s sister’s kids, and my own little sister, my own baby sister Evangeline and her mom Muriel. My dad was such a drunk bastard he didn’t even CARE, his own kid in the hospital ever since she’s born and he can’t even go SEE her, forget helping Muriel with money for her. My own baby sister in the hospital, not even able to hardly BREATHE, and they could kick her out, I bet, if Muriel didn’t pay long enough, and then what? Just let her die?
I couldn’t think about that, not then, not after it all. If we could get enough money, all at once, we could give it to Muriel and maybe we’d never have to worry about Evangeline again.
But we ****** it all up when V.V. almost killed Mr. Kellogg, and now maybe that killed Evangeline too. Because she didn’t get one dollar, NOTHING from it. And now maybe she’ll grow up thinking I’m dead, that I was a screw up just doing shit to do it, and she’ll never know it was all for her. She’ll never know how much I loved her, how I would have gave her all my breath so she’d never go blue again.
Or maybe she’ll never grow up at all, and that’s my fault too.
I didn’t know it would go so bad. I figured, Mr. Kellogg is rich, he can stand to lose a million bucks anyway. We’d take him, me and the rest of the gang, and we wouldn’t hurt him, we would just ask his family for money, and once we had it we’d let him go, no harm done.
But he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t eat, and his wife, his damn stupid wife wouldn’t pay, and then V.V. shot him and everything was ****** from then on.
I couldn’t let them go down for it, the rest of the gang. It was my idea, it was all for me, and if it got screwed over it should be me who went down. So I told them to run…and when the cops came, it was me they saw, and me they took off after. It’s me they’re still after, even though after the car over the bridge incident, which I wasn’t even part of in the first place, I’m pretty sure they think I’m dead. That’s probably the best thing even for the girls, because if they think I’m alive they’d come looking for me, and then they’d get in trouble too.
I knew all my options, if I ever got caught, if anyone knew I wasn’t even sixteen yet and still on the streets, let alone that I was Margaret Ann Sadovsky and I kidnapped one of the richest guys in New York. If I was lucky it would be back to foster homes or my grandma, or my drunkass dad who smacked me around every time he got pissed and lied about me in court and doesn’t want me around anyway, my dad who probably killed my mom but then sends me off to juvie when all I did was DEFEND myself and Violet with the stupid switchblade, I mean if you can’t pull a knife on a guy trying to feel up on your own sister what the hell can you pull it for? And if I wasn’t lucky, it would have been juvie, or prison, and I’d kill or die first.
No, I figured it was better if I never saw them again, if they all thought I was dead. Even Maddy, because that’s what would keep them all safe.
Maddy…god, I missed her so much. It was bad in juvie, but it was worse after I had to play dead, because playing dead would last forever. In juvie I could write to Maddy, even if what I wrote was stupid bullshit that didn’t say anything at all, because all the staff would read it before they’d pass it on. In juvie when it was really bad and I thought I’d go crazy or break apart into pieces if I had to be there one more second hearing their yelling, seeing their stupid grinning faces and feeling their hands on me, I could think of Maddy, see her even with my eyes wide open, and I knew if I just kept my cool I’d get out one day and see her again and nothing would ever pull me away.
But when you’re dead to someone, you don’t have any of that. You can’t write or call and you know you can never see them, and it’s almost like you’re really dead after all. Because you’re dead to them. And after a while even if you close your eyes and see her face so clearly it’s like she’s right there with you, you start to forget how her voice sounded, and how it felt to lay down with her arms around you…the way her eyes glowed when you told her she was your heart.
And she was, you know. Killer, Maddy, Maddy-Monkey…she was mine somehow. I loved my other Foxfire sisters, but Madeleine Faith Wirtz was my heart.
Sometimes after it happened, and I was alone like always, settling in on some fire escape or under a bridge or wherever I was for the night, I’d lay down, and I’d be sick like usual in this awful cold, shivering and coughing like a smoker even though I gave it up when it was too much effort to bum them all the time. I’d be sniffing up snot, keeping my hand over my heart tracing the Foxfire flame that’s been there since I put it there myself when I was thirteen. I’d trace the flame not needing to see it to know the shape, and I’d wonder if somewhere back in New York, or wherever she was then, Maddy was touching hers too.
I hoped she was, that she’d never, ever forget me or her Foxfire sisters, or everything we stood for, that even with it all ****** three ways to Sunday she’d still remember when it was like it was supposed to be, and we were making a difference. Lifting up women, protecting and providing for them, putting the asshole men that kept them down and hurt them in their place…but I was always scared that maybe she didn’t, that maybe she moved on. Found another girl, or worse, a man, and forgot all about me and Foxfire…told him the tattoo was a birthmark and forgot more than my face…forgot me and everything we were.
It can happen, I know it can, because I forgot my own mother, and she’s the one who gave me life, even though I think my father probably took hers away. She might have died for me, and I can’t even remember her face…I can’t remember anything about her. I didn’t ever want that to happen with me and Maddy.
But I could never see her to let her know she was still my heart, and no matter what I could never forget. So when I saw the girl in the gas station and she was Maddy all over, even if she and Maddy didn’t actually look all that much alike, it was like the world was letting me know I had one last chance, and she was it.
So I took it. Should have known I would screw it up too.
